The week in review

Another week, another five dollars (assuming you work a normal five-day week).

If you happened to shut your eyes really tight for the past seven days and ignored the mobile industry, you missed, well, not a great deal, actually. Mostly just new HTC phones and some interesting quotes from Google exec Eric Schmidt.

Speaking of quad-core, the Asus Transformer Prime was officially revealed. We’re looking at January for a UK release, and – despite shipping with Honeycomb (Android 3.2) – it looks pretty awesome-o.

Er, I think that was the most exciting thing to happen this week. Unless the pink Samsung Galaxy S II is your kinda thing.

As for those Eric Schmidt quotes…

"Apple’s Siri is a significant development—a voice-activated means of accessing answers through iPhones that demonstrates the innovations in search." Schmidt reckons the Siri threat proves that Google’s 97% share in net searches doesn’t constitute a monopoly.

“…in general, with all of our partners, we told them that the Motorola deal will close and we will run it sufficiently and independently, that it will not violate the openness of Android.” Schmidt tells Samsung, HTC et al not to worry about Motorola’s potentially privileged position.

“I think most people would agree that Google is a great innovator and I would also point out that the Android effort started before the iPhone effort." Schmidt responds to Steve Jobs’ assertion that Google “f**king ripped off the iPhone”.

"We tell our partners, including the ones here in Taiwan, we will support them. For example, we have been supporting HTC in its dispute with Apple because we think that the Apple thing is not correct." Schmidt pledges Google’s support for Android manufacturers in the war against Apple.